Attack of the Black Rectangles

by Amy Sarig King

“Don’t you dare be sorry for crying,” Grandad says. “Crying is one of the most important things to learn how to do.”

“You’re just in a choppy ocean at the moment.”

What occurs to me right then is that my feelings about this scene are horror, sadness, and shock, but because she made the scene about her own censorship rather than the content of the book, I feel distant because I was more curious about the black rectangle than I was paying attention to the book. It makes me even more determined to fight the whole thing.

cry because the world is a cruel place. I cry because sometimes things don’t make sense. I cry because I feel bad for crying.

“I’m scared that school is just a series of lies and people just keep repeating them and then we all have to live inside a big world of lies and I can’t live like that, Grandad.”

Until we started our protests, people thought they had to follow rules no matter how weird the rules were. We reminded them that just because someone says something is the way it should be, it doesn’t mean that’s the way it should be.